SEO Services Buyer’s Guide: How to Find the Best SEO Company

Unfortunately, there are some bad-faith actors in the SEO industry (which industry doesn’t have a few bad apples?). But the good news is they are typically easy to spot!

Keep an eye out for these red flags as you vet SEO vendors, and walk away immediately if you encounter any of them.

There is no transparency and/or they won’t clearly explain what they intend to do for you.

• If they can’t clearly communicate their strategies and tactics, they either don’t know what they’re doing or they’re using shady, black-hat techniques.

They are non-communicative or very slow to respond when you ask questions.

• Open and consistent communication is essential to a successful SEO partnership, so issues with communication during the purchasing process are a bad sign.

They provide the option to choose the anchor text of backlinks.

• Natural backlinks are published by other websites and your SEO agency shouldn’t have control over anchor text because they don’t own or control those websites (if they’re executing white-hat link building).

They promise thousands of links over a short period of time.

• High inbound link velocity is a sign of automation and a negative signal to search engines — building real links takes time because you have to convince another (usually busy) human to link to you.

It’s not clear or easy to find out who the humans behind the agency are.

• If you don’t see any real faces on the website, it’s usually an indication that many of the company’s processes are automated by technology or out-sourced to cheaper, off-shore labor.

There is no office location or mailing address listed on the website.

• Many agencies manage remote teams or have multiple offices which is fine, but if you can’t even find a mailing address then something is off.

The agency website isn’t indexed in Google.

• Run a quick Google search for the firm’s brand name — if you don’t see any results then they have either been de-indexed or they’re horrible at SEO, both of which are reasons to avoid this vendor.

You see mostly negative, few positive, or no online reviews and/or testimonials.

• Reviews need to be taken with a grain of salt as anyone can leave them (good or bad), but a trusted agency that has been in operation for a number of years should have a decent amount of reviews (again, good and bad).

The company’s website lacks case studies or proof of work.

• If you can’t find any evidence of success or proof that the agency can achieve results, they probably can’t.

Claims to have a relationship with Google.

• Anyone claiming to have a relationship or secret “in” with Google is lying and distrustful — the only way to get preferential treatment in Google’s search rankings is by paying for it, with PPC.

Guaranteed #1 rankings.

• While there are best practices to follow and strategies that will put you in the best position to perform in search, at the end of the day Google controls the rankings and there is no way to guarantee #1 rankings within any SERP.

Says they will submit your website to thousands of search engines.

• This isn’t how search engines work, as long as your website is crawlable, search engines will find it and index it, there is no submission process and any agency that says this is either deceitful or incompetent.

No evidence of thought leadership or industry involvement.

• Reputable agencies regularly produce industry-leading content, speak/present at conferences, and provide helpful training resources for their audiences.

If you spot any of these red flags during your vetting process, immediately eliminate that SEO company from contention and move on. You need an SEO partner you can trust, and these red flags signal an unscrupulous vendor.